About

Nick Modrzewski (b.1988, Melbourne) lives and works in New York.

In his paintings, Modrzewski shifts between elemental gestures and deliberate acts of inscription. Historical citations and specific visual cues are drawn, painted, or carved into textured surfaces, only to be obscured by subsequent layers. Drawing upon an extensive archive of imagery, Modrzewski selects source material based on critical frameworks that guide each body of work: bureaucratic stamps, heraldic crests, aerial maps of prisons, and medieval geometric instruments, for instance, appear in Misbehaviour in the Age of Geometry (COMA, Sydney, 2025). For Gargantua Eats Himself (Lyles & King, New York, 2025), human and animal forms merge into grotesque hybrids, captured in moments of dynamic movement or transformation, recalling 20th century precedents like Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) or Dorothea Tanning’s Chiens de Cythere (Dogs of Cythera) (1963). Through the persistent erosion of the painting’s surface, legible imagery fractures and recedes before resurfacing via methods of excavation, so that the borders between ground and subject become porous, as do the distinctions between species, languages, and environments. Oscillating between aerial and microscopic vantage points, the paintings resist a single, stable position from which to read the surface, producing a disorienting immersion within the picture plane.

Nick Modrzewski has held solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York; The Cabin, Los Angeles; COMA, Sydney; Discordia, Melbourne and First Draft, Sydney. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Make Room, Los Angeles; Olney Gleason, New York; The Times Museum, Guangzhou; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Armory Show with Ames Yavuz, New York; Monash University Museum of Art curated by Jennifer Higgie, Melbourne; La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo; ArtSG, Singapore; Art021, Shanghai; La Loma, Los Angeles; and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore. Selected press includes New American Paintings, Artforum, Los Angeles Times, Cultured, Ofluxo Platform and Kubaparis.

nicholasam88[at]gmail.com